Ep. 103 - How Cronkite Turned The MSM Against The USA
And the gold medal for moral idiocy goes to…the mainstream media! The mainstream media have a new murderous totalitarian to pine for: Kim Yo Jong, the sister of Little Rocket Man. It wasn’t always this way. The American mainstream media may despise their own country now, but it wasn’t so long ago that American journalists were actually patriots. We’ll explain when and why American journalists stopped considering themselves Americans and started attacking their own country.
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And the gold medal for moral idiocy goes to, you guessed it, the mainstream media.
More than a century after Lincoln Steffens fawned over Lenin, 85 years after the New York Times denied Stalin's Holodome War, the mainstream media have a new murderous totalitarian to pine for.
Kim Yo-jong, the sister of Little Rocket Man and a leading figure in the North Korean regime that tortures hundreds of thousands of its own citizens in concentration camps and enslaves and starves millions more through the most oppressive state on the face of the earth.
Believe it or not, it wasn't always this way.
The American mainstream media may despise their own country now, but it wasn't so long ago that American journalists were actually patriots.
We will explain when and why American journalists stopped considering themselves Americans and started attacking their own country.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
So much to get to today.
There are some things we won't even be able to get to.
Those new Obama portraits came out.
I don't know if you saw them, the presidential portraits.
And do you see that?
The Michelle Obama one looks as though Gustav Klimt had been dropped on his head as a baby and produced Michelle Obama's portrait.
But I'm sorry, we don't have time for that.
Because I've got to get out of here today.
I'm going to Palm Beach to give a little talk.
We'll be talking about the future of American conservatism in the age of Donald Trump.
We'll be there with some guys from National Review and the Hoover Institution.
And it should be a lot of fun.
If you're free tomorrow and you're in Palm Beach, you can head over there and maybe we'll go have some burnt steak with ketchup at Mar-a-Lago afterward.
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Let's get into Kim Jong-ho, the dragon lady from...
I don't remember her name, but the dragon lady from North Korea.
The mainstream media, they are in love.
They are in love with the face of the regime that regularly threatens to nuke the United States.
That has violated decades of UN resolutions, official US policy, that constantly threatens to vaporize us with the kid from Up's desk button bomb.
They love her.
Business Insider reported, quote, North Korea's princess...
They also reported, quote, The best part of this, by the way, is she isn't a princess, and nobody calls her that other than Business Insider.
For some reason, they've decided to call her a princess.
The New York Times, quote, Kim Jong-un's sister turns on the charm, taking Pence's spotlight.
The Washington Post, the Ivanka Trump of North Korea, captivates people in the South at the Olympics.
But the best, of course, was CNN. CNN, the most trusted name in apples, or whatever they do.
CNN headline reads, quote, Kim Jong-un's sister is stealing the show at the Winter Olympics.
Stealing the show.
Now here is the piece.
You can watch it on CNN. She will put a young, telegenic face on the regime.
This is a calculated move from Kim Jong-un, experts say, to answer Ivanka Trump's presence at the closing ceremonies.
Kim Yo-jong is the perfect counterpart to this.
And it also is a signal that North Korea is not, you know, this crazy, weird, former Cold War state, but that it too has young women that are capable and are the future leadership.
They have one woman who's capable of future leadership.
She's the only one they don't starve and enslave and kill.
Gary Kasparov, the chess player and activist now, got in on this one.
He said, someone tell CNN that their site has been hacked by the North Korean propaganda ministry.
So that hasn't been hacked.
They just work in tandem with them.
So, that was how the mainstream media reported on Kim Yo-jong.
Just a few statistics about North Korea.
125,000 people there are held in concentration camps.
The GDP is $1,800 a year per capita.
That's reported by the government.
Most people live on $2 to $3 per day.
Even with black market, they live on a third of what Cubans live on from their government.
There's constant enslavement.
People are sent overseas to be slaves for the regime.
There's no electricity throughout most of the place.
There's no working plumbing throughout most of North Korea.
It is just a living hell.
They tortured an American high school, or as a college student rather, to death.
They regularly torture hundreds of thousands of their own people.
This is what they're lauding.
So that's how they treated Kim Yo Dragon Lady.
Kim Yo Dragon Lady.
Here is how the mainstream media reported on the Vice President of the United States, Mike Pence.
New York Magazine, quote, Pence's anti-North Korea PR campaign bombs.
Get it?
Tee-hee-hee?
CNN. Gay Olympic athlete turns down Pence meeting.
The Daily Beast.
To win respect from LGBT Olympians, Pence must condemn conversion therapy.
I don't know why.
And Mike Pence, when did you stop beating your wife?
This is based, by the way, this gay therapy thing.
This is based on a left-wing myth that Mike Pence supports electrocuting homosexuals.
It's because in his 2000 congressional campaign, his website said that he supported an HIV treatment funding law that had a provision with a provision that some funds go toward institutions that treat people who want to change their sexual behavior.
And as a millennial, let me tell you, we could all probably change our sexual behavior a little bit, you know.
A line on a campaign website that allows some HIV treatment funds to go to institutions that treat people who want to change their sexual behavior.
That has become Vice President Pence Wants to Electrocute Gays, according to the mainstream media, where democracy dies in darkness.
And the final headline, last but also least, Slate.
Quote, Olympics jerk watch, the vice president of the United States of America.
The jerk watch.
Murderous dictatress who tortures hundreds of thousands of people to death, enslaves and starves a million more, whose regime just two years ago murdered an American student.
She's a charming princess who throws side-eye, rightly throws side-eye at the American vice president, like a better version of Ivanka Trump.
Nice guy vice president of the United States, whose greatest vice and craziest days were probably when he played acoustic guitar in college.
That guy, nice guy Mike Pence, who, as Hollywood and D.C. crumble with hourly accusations of rape and sexual harassment, refuses to dine alone with women because he doesn't want even the appearance of impropriety.
That guy is a monster who's a fool and a jerk and an embarrassment and definitely, definitely wants to electrocute gays.
For most millennials and post-millennials or whatever they are, this is all they've ever known.
The media despising virtually any display of American strength or patriotism and certainly any Republican in office.
But it wasn't always this way.
There was a time long, long ago when mainstream journalists actually liked their country.
I know.
I know it's shocking.
I'm not saying they weren't left-wing.
I'm not saying they didn't like to puff up lefties like Lincoln Steffens and Walter Durante did.
That happened.
But the media writ large generally rooted for their country.
They considered themselves on the same side as their country.
They didn't consider themselves outside of their country or above their country.
We saw this as recently as the Second World War.
On March 17th, 1942, General MacArthur landed in Australia.
Here is the New York Times headline.
The New York Times headline.
MacArthur in Australia as Allied Commander.
Move hailed as foreshadowing.
Turn of tide.
Third National Army draft begins in capital.
That's a glowing thing.
I don't know why it's going to turn the tide, but clearly the Times is rooting for him.
It's going to turn the tide of the war.
We hope so.
Could you imagine what it would say today?
On May 12th, 1943, Axis forces surrendered.
The New York Times reported, quote, Tunisian resistance ends in rout of Germans.
Going to rout those damn dirty Germans.
On June 6, 1944, the Allies landed at Normandy.
If D-Day had occurred in 2018, CNN or the New York Times would no doubt report something like, quote, 200,000 Allies dead.
When will Trump resign?
Mike Pence hates gays or something.
But thankfully, D-Day occurred in 1944 when the New York Times ran the headline, Quote, Hitler's seawall is breached.
Invaders fighting their way inland.
New allied landings are made.
It's not quite that they were cheerleaders.
They were.
They're pretty close.
But it's the choice of wording here.
Rout of Germans.
Hitler's seawall breached.
They clearly have a side.
They're partisans.
They have a country.
They have a team.
They are Americans.
They are going to root for the Americans.
They're going to root for their own country.
On February 11, 1945 at Yalta, the New York Times doesn't even pretend.
The headline reads, quote, They doom it.
Could you imagine that headline today?
They wouldn't run the story at all.
Instead, the New York Times would run a story about the three Allied troops who accidentally shot an unarmed German or something.
That would be the front page.
Yalta, the defeat of Nazism.
Maybe that would be page Z75. Maybe.
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Back to when the press was good.
At the bloody, awful landing at Iwo Jima, Where American casualties exceeded Japanese casualties, where just the 25th Marine's 3rd Battalion suffered an 83.3% casualty rate.
The New York Times headline read this.
U.S. Marines storm ashore on Iwo Jima.
Patton strikes again.
Could you imagine today?
Americans slaughtered.
Mass casualties.
War is over.
Time for the U.S. to pull out.
Mike Pence hates gay people.
Or So presumably that's what I would read.
Even as recently as the mid-20th century, the American press supported their country against its enemies, against Nazism, against the Soviet Union.
They at least supported the liberal consensus which opposed the spread of communism.
That was that mid-century kind of consensus.
Now we'd probably call it the deep state view.
But it was at least a pro-American view held by the press and by the American officials.
There was a TV show that ran from 1950 to 1953 called Battle Report Washington.
That time period coincided with the Korean conflict, a military engagement that nearly spilled into mainland China.
A lot of pressure on.
The show featured interviews with government and military leaders.
Where was it produced?
In the White House itself, NBC broadcasted to give, quote, the people of the United States a firsthand account of what the federal government is doing in the worldwide battle against communism.
That was NBC. The show's host, John Steelman, referred to communist belligerents as the 14 barbarians, power-drunk atheists, and And bloodthirsty barbarians that ran on NBC could be exactly the opposite today.
Even Edward R. Murrow, the anti-McCarthy television journalist on CBS, even Murrow, whom I don't care for that much, but even Murrow, in between attacks on Republicans, sat on the State Department panel on overseas information and lobbed softball questions at Secretary of State Dean Acheson.
Now consider the New York Times headlines in the war in Iraq.
So this was a much more recent war.
November 6, 2004.
Poll shows view of Iraq war as most negative since the start.
Also November 6th.
Getting Iraq wrong.
October 12, 2007.
Two killed in shooting mourned far beyond Iraq.
They're not talking about American troops that were killed in the shooting.
The Times is using the death of Iraqis at the hands of private security to attack the American war effort and to attack the use of Blackwater.
Also November 6, 2004.
Protest focuses on Iraq troop increase.
October 2007, former top general in Iraq faults Bush administration.
April 2007, injured in Iraq, a soldier is shattered at home.
That's just the New York Times.
And that's just a random smattering.
I just googled a random smattering of Iraq headlines.
Just about every headline is a new attempt to undermine the American war effort, to undercut morale among troops and at home.
And now we see the mainstream media fawning over a top official from the most repressive anti-American regime on earth, which regularly threatens to blow us all to smithereens.
Quite a change.
How, when, and why did the mainstream media turn on its own country?
How, when and why did the mainstream media turn on its own country?
Walter Cronkite Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America.
Cronkite was voted the most trusted man in America in an opinion poll in the 1960s.
And the title stuck.
He concluded his news program on CBS by saying, And that's the way it is.
That's the way it is.
He's regularly cited, almost exclusively by lefties, as the last example of unbiased news.
Just the facts.
No opinion.
No spin.
Cronkite was just the facts.
He probably didn't even have a political opinion.
When he did, he was just a straight shooter.
Except none of that's true.
Cronkite wasn't the last straight journalist before all hell broke loose.
In reality, it was Cronkite who did the breaking.
Cronkite was the first major modern American journalist to consider himself untethered to his own country, above national boundaries, a citizen of the world.
And it's really incredible that people even make this claim anymore, that Cronkite just told you what the facts were just the way it is.
The man single-handedly lost us the Vietnam War.
This great man, this facts-only journalist, this alleged American declared that the war was lost.
Here's what he said.
To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past.
To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism.
To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, if unsatisfactory, conclusion.
On the off chance, the military and political analysts are right.
In the next few months, we must test the enemy's intentions in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations.
But it is increasingly clear to this report that the only rational way out then Will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could.
This is Walter Cronkite.
Good night.
Just the facts.
Just the facts.
I wonder if he would have said the same thing in the face of other threats.
There were a lot of people calling on Britain to negotiate with Hitler and Mussolini.
But that's the only way.
We can just negotiate.
That was it.
That's it.
That's it.
The journalist, David Halberstam, said that that report turned American opinion irreparably against the war.
Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley agrees.
It is said, it might be apocryphal, but there's some evidence that he said it, that LBJ told his press secretary upon hearing of Cronkite's segment something along the lines of, if I've lost Walter Cronkite, I've lost Middle America.
The segment came out after Walter Cronkite visited Vietnam and he visited Vietnam only weeks after the Tet Offensive, a massive victory for the Americans.
We lost 249 Americans and 500 South Vietnamese compared to 10,000 North Vietnamese dead in just the few days of the offensive.
The communists would go on to lose upwards of 30,000 men captured or killed.
The communists were so decimated by the fighting that Nixon CIA director Richard Helms stated that even a year later, Hanoi would still require considerable time to rebuild its forces.
But Walter Cronkite didn't like the war.
He didn't like the war, and so he reported it wrong.
He undercut the morale of the troops and of the American public, and that's the way it was, and that's the way it was.
Cronkite was also harping on environmentalism around this time, which he blamed on overpopulation, like all the other lightly educated radicals of the 1970s.
When the world, by the way, was less than half populated as it is today.
Two days before the first Earth Day, Cronkite began a regular segment titled, Can the World Be Saved?
Spoiler alert, it was not about a certain Jewish carpenter from first century Palestine.
He was talking about environmentalists.
He thought and wrote in an introduction to George Orwell's 1984 book, That it was about, not about left totalitarianism, but rather about technology.
He wrote, quote, 1984 is an anguished lament and a warning that vibrates powerfully when we may not be strong enough, nor wise enough, nor moral enough to cope with the kind of power we have learned to amass.
Not once, not even once did he mention the Soviet Union or China.
Joseph Epstein of Commentary Magazine wrote at this point that by then Cronkite had entered that phase of liberalism that finds no country more dangerous than one's own.
Absolutely true.
He not so subtly insinuated, this is Cronkite, that Barry Goldwater was comparable to Nazis, announcing whether or not Senator Goldwater wins the nomination, he's going places.
The first place being Germany.
He was going to visit...
It set off an entire segment about the coincidence that Libertarian Goldwater was about to go visit an American general in Bavaria.
Here is a clip of the ostensibly objective Walter Cronkite preening.
Good evening.
This is Ted Baxter, and now here is the news.
Good evening.
This is Ted Baxter, and now here is the news.
Good evening.
Come in.
Oh, wait a minute.
I'm sorry, that was Ted Baxter from the Mary Tyler Moore Show.
I don't know how they got in there.
Okay, here is the actual Walter Cronkite going full prattle.
I know that liberalism isn't dead in this country.
It isn't even comatose.
It simply is suffering a severe case of acute laryngitis.
It simply is temporarily, we hope, lost its voice.
About that democratic loss in the election.
It seems to me it was not just a candidate who belatedly found a voice that could reach the people.
It was not just a campaign strategy built on a defensive philosophy.
It was not just an opposition that conducted one of the most sophisticated and cynical campaigns ever.
It was not just a failure to reach out to every section of our nation and every sector of our society.
It was the fault of too many who found their voices stilled by not so subtle ideological intimidation.
For instance, we know that unilateral military action in Grenada and Tripoli was wrong.
We know that Star Wars means uncontrollable escalation of the arms race.
We know that the real threat to democracy is in the half of that nation in poverty.
We know that Thomas Jefferson was right when he said a democracy cannot be both ignorant and free.
We know, we know that no one should tell a woman she has to bear an unwanted child.
We know, we know.
I'm sorry, I apologize to Ted Baxter for comparing him to Walter Cronkite.
Very unfair to Ted Baxter.
What's really funny about that, by the way, is he said, we know, we know.
Ronald Reagan used to say that it's not that our liberal friends are ignorant, it's that they know so much that isn't so.
And basically everything he just said isn't true.
The SDI, Star Wars, was not a failure.
It didn't lead to uncontrollable arms races.
Actually, it did exactly what Ronald Reagan predicted it would and defeated the Soviet Union.
After he's bewailing this awful arms race that's going to go on, less than two years later, the Soviet Union was over.
We defeated communism because of all the policies that he bewails.
We know that we have to murder children in the womb.
We know, don't we know?
So that's Walter Cronkite.
That's the objective of Walter Cronkite.
As if that weren't enough, by the 1990s, Cronkite had descended into full-on, empty-headed leftism, endorsing a one-world government and the loss of American sovereignty.
We Americans are going to have to yield up some of our sovereignty.
That's going to be, to many, a bitter pill.
It would take a lot of courage, a lot of faith, a lot of persuasion for them to come along with us on this necessity.
Today we must develop federal structures on a global level.
To deal with world problems, we need a system of enforceable world law, a democratic federal world government, You know, what Alexander Hamilton wrote about the need for law among the 13 states applies today to the approximately 200 sovereignties in our global village, all of which are going to have to be convinced to give up some of that sovereignty to the better, greater union.
Hamilton said, and it's not going to be easy.
It's not going to be easy.
You catch that little thread at the end?
It's not going to be easy.
Uh-oh.
Come on, bring it on, Walt.
Cronkite concluded the speech by saying, quote, Pat Robertson has written in a book a few years ago that we should have a world government, but only when the Messiah arrives.
He wrote, literally, any attempt to achieve world order before that time must be the work of the devil.
Well, join me.
I'm glad to sit here at the right hand of Satan.
That's how he concluded that speech.
That's no joke.
Those are his exact words.
Hillary Clinton was in attendance at the event.
The then First Lady approached Cronkite after the speech and said, For decades you told us the way it is, but tonight we honor you for fighting for the way it could be, for the way it should be.
Isn't that really, oh...
Walter Cronkite.
Why don't we have a Walter Cronkite anymore?
Not these partisan people on T. Hannity.
Just someone to tell us the way it is.
And also to advocate for abortion and the erasure of national boundaries and population control.
You know, just the way it is.
And I don't mean just to pick on Cronkite.
I am going to pick on more journalists.
But, oh, this is bad.
I've got to say, this is so sad.
I'm sorry.
What can I do?
My hands are tied.
That's the way it is.
It's just the way it is.
I have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Probably I'm not saying goodbye to YouTube, because I think at this point, anytime I pop up there, they put out a hit on me.
They send out some assassins to come find me.
We are all persona, non-personae, non-gratae anymore at YouTube, so you're probably not seeing us there.
But if you're on Facebook, sorry, you've got to go to dailywire.com.
What do you get if you go there?
It's $10 a month or $100 for an annual membership.
You get me, you get the Andrew Klavan show, you get the Ben Shapiro show, you get the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
This is very important.
Because whenever you say anything mean about one of their gods, one of their deities, like Walter Cronkite, the leftist tears start spewing.
You're going to get a lot of this now.
Those Obama portraits were so hideous that it'll probably spike some leftist tears.
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And boy, oh boy, are your love meters about to spike.
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streaming live at the Daily Wire Facebook page and the Daily Wire YouTube channel, maybe.
And we'll be free for everyone to watch, but only subscribers get to ask the questions.
To ask questions as a subscriber, log in to our website, dailywire.com, to watch the live stream and head over to The Conversation page.
After that, just start typing into the Daily Wire chat box, where we will pull live questions as they come in.
I will not have slept for about two days, so you're sure to get some good answers.
I'm going to try to get the ashes beforehand, so I may be covered in ash.
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We will be right back.
The question we began with.
This is the sum of it all.
The question we began with.
Why do the American media hate their own country?
Why did they used to side with their own country, but now they don't?
The answer is their ignorant, feigned objectivity, which is not just typified by Walter Cronkite.
It actually began with him.
That last clip tells us the whole story.
American journalists in 2018 consider themselves citizens of the world.
Here is Christiane Amanpour from CNN. Okay, you've talked about nationalism and tribalism here today.
I asked him, how did you have the guts to confront the prevailing winds of anti-globalization, nationalism, populism, when you could see what happened in Brexit, where you could see what happened in the United States, and what might have happened in many European elections at the beginning of 2017?
And he said...
For me, nationalism means war.
Make sure that you go to the trusted brands to get your main information, no matter whether you have a wide, eclectic, you know, intake.
Really stick with the brand names that you know, because in this world right now, at this moment right now, our crises, our challenges, our problems are so severe That unless we are all engaged as global citizens who appreciate the truth, who understand science, empirical evidence and facts, then we are just simply going to be wandering along.
To a potential catastrophe.
Don't you dare listen to anybody other than us.
You can only listen to CNN, you know, because you want to search for the truth.
So don't read anybody other than CNN, because that's how you find the truth, is by only reading one source, and it's us.
Christiane Amanpour, or as Andrew Klavan calls her, Christiane Amanpour journalist.
Christiane Amanpour, ostensibly a naturalized American citizen, but that's not how she thinks of herself.
She doesn't think of herself as an American citizen.
She thinks of herself as a global citizen, a citizen of the world.
I literally just picked her at random when looking for a clip of a journalist calling himself a citizen of the world.
I'm pretty sure I could Google basically any major mainstream journalist and find a clip of him describing himself as a citizen of the world.
This is perhaps the most frequently used empty phrase in the elite halls of the United States.
When I was in college, the administration told us this all the time.
We are educating you to be citizens of the world.
We are a global university.
I'm sure Ben heard the same thing at Harvard.
It is especially ironic, actually, in the case of Yale, because Yale used to be the American university, the most famous alumnus of Yale, which is now a global university that educates citizens of the world.
Is the American revolutionary Nathan Hale, who famously said as the British hanged him, I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.
But now it's a global university.
Journalists used to consider at least national security concerns.
They would work with the State Department or with the White House when they were covering foreign affairs.
They didn't hate their country.
Now they attack our milquetoast vice president and they fawn over a murderous dictatress.
And it's not just universities and journalists, perhaps the most dangerous of all.
The largest publishing company in the history of the world considers itself not an American entity, but a global one.
Here is Mark Zuckerberg at the Global Citizen Festival in 2015.
If everyone has access to the tools, knowledge, and opportunities of connectivity, we give voice to the voiceless and power to the powerless.
When we're all connected, we can achieve our global goals.
That's why this morning I spoke to the United Nations.
Over the next few days, a lot of focus is going to be on world leaders.
But if we want to achieve real change, we need you and leaders in every community to make their voices heard.
Tonight is a part of something very important.
We are not a generation of bystanders.
We are all global citizens.
Let's go connect the world.
That is so creepy.
Oh, yikes.
It's like he studied in Italian for three seconds and he's like, I've got to move my hands up and down.
Facebook is the largest publishing company in the history of the world.
Even though it pretends not to be a publishing company, actually.
It says, oh, we're just a tech company.
We're a social network.
We're, you know, we just let people, but that isn't true.
It isn't a social network.
It's a publishing company.
There's a new algorithm which is killing us, by the way.
It is killing the Daily Wire.
They're trying to kill the Daily Wire.
By the way, a little sidebar.
If you want to keep getting news from either my Facebook page or Ben's or Drew's or the Daily Wire, you have to go to that page now physically and whitelist the page and say you want to get information from those pages because they're trying to block us.
They're trying to kill us.
They decide.
Facebook decides what news gets through and what doesn't.
Facebook is an American company, but they think globally.
They don't think nationally.
They say, we're not an American company.
I mean, yeah, we started out in America.
I'm an American citizen.
We developed it here at an American university.
But no, no, no, we think globally.
And this is really awful.
The trouble with all of this lefty claptrap is there is no such thing as a global citizen.
There's no such thing.
There is no citizenship of the world.
It's another use of euphemistic language.
Kind of like we were talking about last week on gay marriage.
The conservative opposition to gay marriage is not that we don't like gay people or we don't want them to do whatever they want to do with one another or be happy or follow their consciences or whatever.
It's that the phrase is nonsense.
That the definition of marriage It implies sexual difference.
It's something akin to a hot ice cube.
The phrase doesn't make sense.
That's the same problem with global citizenship.
A citizen belongs to a country.
In a democratic republic such as ours, citizens govern ourselves.
In other countries, this isn't the case.
They are governed by others.
But citizenship has a meaning.
It entitles one to certain privileges and rights granted or acknowledged by the government.
It entitles one to protection by the nation's military and police forces.
And it comes with certain obligations, taxation, in some cases military service, jury duty, what have you.
It's a relationship with tangible consequences.
Global citizenship entails none of these things.
One's rights and privileges are not protected simply by virtue of existing in the world.
Just ask the citizens of North Korea.
Because rights need to be protected and laws enforced by men with guns who have the authority to enforce them.
The bonds that have sustained the nation state, what's called the Westphalian system, For the past 370 years since the Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years' War and established the modern world order, those bonds which bind countrymen together, they can't be stretched indefinitely.
They can't be stretched infinitely.
We can't even get Italians.
Excuse me, I'll use my own ancestors.
We cannot get Italians from the South and the North to believe that they're part of the same country.
Much less can we get Italians to consider Bangladeshis, their fellow countrymen, their co-citizens of the world.
The reason this matters so much is that it is in no small part what Donald Trump premised his campaign on.
This is what is meant by globalism.
Elites in journalism, the academy, technology, politics, they no longer believe in the nation state.
They think they have much more in common with their fellow enlightened cosmopolites, the Davos crowd, who go to TED Talks and drink kombucha, and I'm getting off on a tangent, but those people.
They feel that they have much more in common with elites in London than their countrymen in Texas.
And maybe they do.
Maybe they do.
But we can't sustain that forever because their buddies in London aren't going to protect them and assure their rights.
This is part of the theme we've been talking about for a few weeks.
The impulse of rationalism to try to abstract oneself from real circumstances, to consider oneself above the time and space in which one lives.
You aren't better than your country.
You aren't other than your countrymen.
American journalists want to call balls and strikes on foreign affairs, but they shouldn't call balls and strikes because they're Americans and they have a stake in America's coming out on top in the world.
The Davos crowd's impulse to be the umpire is the same impulse that caused Adam to sin in the garden.
It is the sin of pride.
There is only one umpire.
The rest of us are players.
The self-appointed elites who pretend otherwise, from Walter Cronkite in Vietnam to CNN in Pyeongchang, think that forsaking their countries makes them sophisticated.
And maybe that's a good word to use, because it certainly does make them look sophisticated.
It makes them look like fools.
All right, that's our show.
I'm going to end on a little bit of a low note today.
I'm going to end on a low note talking about Walter Cronkite and all those jerks fawning over dictatresses.
It's also Abraham Lincoln's birthday.
Happy birthday to Abraham Lincoln.
You know, they tried to take away his birthday.
They tried to make it just President's Day.
They did this to George Washington, too.
They mashed them up and make it President's Day.
But we're not celebrating Millard Fillmore.
We're not celebrating Franklin Roosevelt or Barack Obama.
We're celebrating Washington and Lincoln.
So happy birthday to Abraham Lincoln.
So I'll be on that red eye tonight.
There will be a show tomorrow.
If you're in Palm Beach tomorrow, stop by the Kuder Institute.
We're going to have a lovely talk with some really great speakers from Hoover Institution, National Review, Al Felsenberg, who just wrote a wonderful biography of Bill Buckley.
Really, I mean, so leagues away from any other thing written about him.
You have to read it.
So if you're in town, grab a ticket, and maybe I'll broadcast the show from Mar-a-Lago with some...
Burnt steak and ketchup.
I don't know what to say.
I'll try to do that.
And I'll be back in town on Wednesday for the conversation.
